


Symbiosis

by clonesanity



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Body Horror, Graphic Description of Corpses, Post-Canon, Recreational Drug Use, Season/Series 04, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-04
Updated: 2016-05-04
Packaged: 2018-06-06 08:17:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,223
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6746362
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clonesanity/pseuds/clonesanity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Cosima examines Dr. Leekie's remains she finds something unexpected.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Symbiosis

**Author's Note:**

  * For [OBFrankenfics](https://archiveofourown.org/users/OBFrankenfics/gifts).



> Contains S4 spoilers. This little thing is kind of half-baked, but I felt like if I didn't post it tonight it wouldn't happen before episode 4x04 airs and I would lose motivation. So, yeah.

"Who’s the science now, bitch?"

Long stretches of slime come away with her hands as Cosima drops Leekie’s head onto the lab bench with a thud.

She rattles the tools in a nearby instrument tray and selects a scalpel. Scott approaches to give her a specimen jar, then quickly takes a few steps back.

“I’m not comfortable with this, Cosima. I mean we… we knew him. I mean, sort of. You knew him. Don't you think he deserves better than this?”

“The dead don’t give a shit, Scott.” As a member of the soon-to-be-dead Cosima felt pretty confident speaking on their behalf. She considered telling Scott to man up, but even in her agitation Cosima could read the extreme anxiety in his body language as he looked on warily from a distance. She decided to wave him off instead.

“It’s fine, dude. I got this. You don’t look so good; why don’t you go get some coffee or something? Play a round of Magic the Gathering and clear your head.”

Scott briefly hesitated but made no objection before grabbing his jacket and heading upstairs toward sunlight and fresh air. He seemed eager, though he would never admit it to Cosima, to escape the claustrophobic confines of the lab and return to the world of the living for awhile. Cosima listened to his steps fade away into a welcome silence and stillness.

Since moving to the Rabbit Hole privacy was a rare commodity. And with her illness getting worse, the hardest thing to cope with was the feeling of being smothered by everyone's well-intentioned but infuriating attempts to pretend that everything is okay. Her coughing episodes were becoming more frequent, more violent, and she knew everyone was noticing. But rather than acknowledge her deterioration, people preferred to politely look away whenever Cosima began to hack bloody phlegm into her hand. Her kidneys were also beginning to cause her a lot of pain but she tried to hide it from the others as best she could; hiding the truth felt preferable to enduring the polite unreality of watching them pretend to not know.

Worse still was the way her sisters would try to strike up conversations on the most banal topics to distract her from thoughts of Delphine. Just this week Alison had tried to engage her with questions about Beyonce’s new album. Felix had attempted to draw her into a discussion of the silly street names they could use for her medical weed crop. For a few moments this would bring her to the present, but inevitably she would lose the thread of the conversation and her thoughts would return to Delphine. And then she would be overwhelmed all at once with the crushing loss, anxiety, and regret.

When she was in a good mood the emotional whiplash from dealing with her friends made her feel tired, and when she wasn't it made her angry. No amount of chit-chat or platitudes or averting-of-eyes would change the reality that her days are few and numbered. Every day she had to stare down the real probability that Delphine was already dead somewhere, and soon she would be too.

Another cough ripped through her, harsh and sudden, piercing the quiet. Cosima’s gloved hand involuntarily rose to cover her mouth, but the ripe smell of Leekie’s fetid ooze triggered a last-minute redirect of the gesture. Bright flecks of blood and a few dark clots splattered the work surface and added a speckling of color to Leekie’s gray green face.

She closed her eyes while clearing her throat, and steadying herself against the bench she remembered herself in a lab that was much larger and brighter. Or perhaps not that much brighter, but lighter because Delphine was there with her, back in the DYAD, poised to autopsy the remains of Jennifer Fitsimmons. Cosima remembered most of all how the flourescent lights in the operating theatre reflected off of Delphine’s uncertain eyes - deep brown pools that had shone with concern and affection even from behind a cotton face mask and plastic eye shield.

“Are you okay to help me with this?“

“Yeah, yeah. I’m okay,” she had said. But she hadn't been okay then, either, of course. Nothing about dissecting a defective copy of yourself is okay. But she hadn't wanted to leave; she wanted to see everything, to know everything, about what was in store for her. And she hadn't quite trusted Delphine to tell her the full truth.

“I trust that you did a rotation in Pathology, Dr. Cormier?” Cosima had deflected.

"I did."

Cosima hung on the memory of those simple words. _I never did any goddamned pathology rotation_ , she thought, as she opened her eyes and the image of Delphine’s delicate beauty was replaced with Leekie’s gruesome visage. She set the blade aside and picked up a sharpie to plot a few guide marks across her former adversary's face. This exercise in planning was really a form of procrastination, as she was feeling pretty certain that whatever she’d find inside would be less pleasant than what was already looking back at her.

“I’m sorry to tell you that you probably won’t be on any magazine covers, Doctor Leekie. Especially after I’m done here today.”

She picked up her scalpel and pushed record on her laptop camera.

"Today is May 4, 2016. Subject Dr. Aldous Leekie, formerly of the Dyad Institute, deceased approximately 3 months, is believed to be host to a Neolution maggotbot similar to the one identified in Sarah Manning. Visual inspection of the host subject reveals soft tissue structures of the face are mostly still intact. However, ugh… putrescent odors and… greenish discharge from the mouth and nasal passages indicate active decomposition occurring as expected."

She eyed the red splotches she had coughed onto his face moments before.

"Mottled red patches of blood on facial surface are due to recent post-mortem contamination and unrelated to decedent's death or decomposition processes." She punctuated the sentence unintentionally with a small cough into the crook of her arm before continuing her narration for the camera.

“Based on previous ultrasound of Sarah’s infected cheek, we hypothesize the parasite is favorable toward the face. I will begin by removing a square section from the subject’s right cheek above the maxillary artery.”

With trembling hands she made two sets of parallel incisions, following her sharpie guidelines and carving out a square section of the jaw. An offensive green liquid oozed from the cuts. 

"Incisions complete and still no sign of the parasite."

She set aside the scalpel and took the forceps from the instrument tray. A gentle pull was really all it took to strip off the decaying tissue and expose a yawning hole in the side of Leekie’s face. The opening was lined with perfect teeth that would be the envy of any AARP member.

She laid the cheek skin side down on the table in front of her. A small hole showed a place where the maggotbot, if there is one, might still be burrowed inside. 

"I can see a small perforation in the lining of the inner cheek. Still no sign of any movement. Hypothesis: Maybe the parasites die when the host dies?"

Cosima took up her scalpel again and began widening the preexisting hole. Leekie’s decomposing flesh scraped away easily to reveal the first glimpse of the maggotbot that had been cocooned inside. She felt a thrill of excitement and dread at the sight of the bot. She gingerly poked at it, but the bot itself seemed unresponsive and impervious to the blade.

She took her forceps and gently pulled the motionless robotic worm from its fleshy sheath. It slid out easily enough, and Cosima marveled at its size. This bot was several times larger than Sarah's -- nearly the size of her pinky finger. 

“Dayyumm. The specimen is large: approximately two and a half inches in length, and a quarter inch wide at it’s widest. Hypothesis: the parasites grow in size during their residence in the host. Will need more data to ascertain growth rate and developmental biology.” 

Cosima imagined something of that size must be impossible to ignore once it starts moving around in your face. Her molars ached as she fantasized the bot pushing down on her teeth from the inside of her gums. She wanted to vomit.

Cosima tentatively tested the surface of the bot with applied pressure. “The specimen looks metallic but the surface is surprisingly squishy under pressure while also maintaining impressive resistance to laceration. The body is made up of several articulated segments. I can count… ”

She leaned in to get an accurate inventory of the body segments when the parasite suddenly hummed to life in her hands. Cosima jerked back in sudden horror, nearly letting go of her grip on the forceps. Now in aggressive wriggling motion, the finger-sized bot struggled to escape the pinch of the surgical tool. She managed to keep hold on it just long enough to transfer the bot into the nearby specimen jar Scott had prepared for her before leaving.

She twisted down the lid and breathed a small sigh of relief. 

Cosima adjusted the laptop camera to focus on the specimen jar as the bot buzzed and wiggled around the perimeter. It periodically stopped and stretched toward the lid as if searching by feel for a hidden way out. She’d seen spiders trapped under a glass repeat a similar procedure many times before but with the chaotic motion of a scared animal operating on dumb instinct. The systematic and thorough way the bot explored the edges of its confines left her with a distinct impression of intelligence. She felt the goosebumps raising on her skin.

After checking all sides of its container the bot began to tap the glass with a steady force. Cosima’s mind briefly returned to the Discovery Channel special she’d once watched about mantis shrimp that can strike blows hard enough to shatter aquarium glass.

_Tap t-tap t-tap tap tap._

The events of the previous few moments had a surreal quality that made Cosima question her lucidness. Seeing the ultrasounds of Sarah's cheek had been enough to convince her these things weren't just some imagined psychosis. But seeing another one here, one that had been a silent presence in her past conversations with Leekie and Delphine, made her head spin. She needed to process. She fumbled around the lab for her vaporizer.

The uneven staccato rhythms continued as she took a few hits and attempted to relax. She tried to conjure a memory of Leekie's face during their many meetings -- at school, at the restaurant, at DYAD, in the back of the limo. If she had known what to look for, could she have known?

The bot continued to tap against the glass. Based on her struggle to maintain control of the forceps a few moments ago, she suspected it could put out a lot more concentrated force than it was currently tapping out into the glass if escape was its the goal.

Cosima sucked deep and held it in. If escape was the goal.

_Tap t-tap t-tap._

Cosima started to relax a bit. She let the details blur, and instead of thinking of the robot worm tapping on the glass her thoughts came to rest on the surprising regularity of the tap tap tapping. It felt like there was a pattern there, but she wasn’t sure what.

Abruptly the bot stopped and laid motionless in the center of its small prison. Maybe saving its energy for the next opportunity to strike, Cosima thought. Cosima stopped the camera since the show seemed to be over.

She took another hit, then pulled up her laptop to review the footage of the worm. The regular irregularity of the tapping made her uneasy. It's like code. Morse code?

No way.

She went back to the beginning of the video log and transcribed the opening sequence of taps. She expected it to amount to nothing but gibberish, but a few moments later she had a translation in Google:

`WE HAVE DELPH`

Delphine! She rubbed her eyes in disbelief, but the message was still there on the screen. Cosima’s hands trembled in nervous excitement as she clicked back to the video and frantically filled a sheet of her notebook with a record of the entire sequence of taps.

``  
.-- . / .... .- ...- . / -.. . .-.. .--. .... .. -. . / .- -. -.. / .-- . / -.-. .- -. /  
\- .- -.- . / -.-- --- ..- / - --- / .... . .-. / .. ..-. / -.-- --- ..- / .- -.-  
. -.-. . .--. - / --- ..- .-. / --- ..-. ..-. . .-. .-.-.- / .-- . / .--. .-. ---  
.--. --- ... . / ... -.-- -- -... .. --- ... .. ... .-.-.-  


An internet translator spit out the full transcript:

`WE HAVE DELPHINE AND WE CAN TAKE YOU TO HER IF YOU ACCEPT OUR OFFER. WE PROPOSE SYMBIOSIS.`

Cosima’s blood ran cold. Symbiosis. As in, she would need to voluntarily allow this silver slug to take up residence in her head. She coughed and hugged herself. The thought of feeling this… this thing moving around inside of her made her ill.

But the need to see Delphine again was undeniable. Maybe Delphine needs my help? The message doesn’t say anything about how she is.

If they have Delphine there’s no question that I have to do it, Cosima finally decided. After she’d mentally resigned herself to this fate, she thought up some further rationalizations: She might be dead in a few weeks anyway. And she would learn things about the bots to help Sarah that she couldn’t learn in any other way.

Sarah would never allow it, she felt sure of that. But this was her body, her decision.


End file.
